Just to add my voice – please don’t make it core

I know this has been said many times by many other users, but please don’t make this core or – if you must – allow developers to stick with “classic” WP on installation, at least for a good few years after rollout.

As a plugin, I’m impressed – it’s slick, looks good and works well. But as a concept I’m really worried about it and a huge proportion of WP users who are going to be alienated by this move.

I can see the use of this for the one-man-band operations who have developed their site and run it themselves, using a pre-built theme, but there’s a large user base who are medium to large businesses and enterprises who use WP through an agency who’ve designed and built a site with custom themes and functionality, and moving to Gutenberg in core is going to end up with a requirement to rebuild huge numbers of sites at great cost. None of my clients are going to be happy if their perfectly working sites suddenly need to be rebuilt just to allow for functionality they don’t use.

Page builders have a role to play, and I do like the idea of adding one which has better “core” support, better revisioning, and which looks as good as this: but there are also some very good reasons not to use a page builder. When a client invests hundreds – or more likely thousands – of dollars on a design for a site, we want to build a back-end which fits that design. We want to limit their editors in such a way that we know all content is going to be on-brand and in keeping with the design they’ve paid for. It’s bad enough when editors get carried away in tinyMCE with text colours and sizes, but at least we can limit radical page layout changes and present them with simple steps to create consistent, templated pages. It’s certainly not unheard of for clients to approach me looking for a way to limit what their editors can do in terms of layout and styling. People often want step-by-step forms so they can just type the right content in the right boxes without needing to create “blocks” and navigate all the different types, options and formatting.

It’s also incredibly worrying that (and I recognise that this is something you’re aware of) custom meta doesn’t work with Gutenberg. Yes, plugin developers have time to change what they do, but what about all the custom developments out there which use WordPress as a framework? What about all the sites using WordPress for e-commerce – how is that going to work? Gutenberg is absolutely not going to work with e-commerce… it would be useful on maybe 5% of the content on an e-commerce site, so why would it need to be core? Make it a plugin.

Please, please reconsider whether this needs to become part of core. It’s telling that Wix and other site builders are being brought up as “the competition” and it’s clear that Gutenberg is being presented as a way to keep in that part of the market and as a move to WordPress as SaaS, but that’s far from the whole market and it’s certainly not what the .org project has ever felt to me to be about. I’ve always sold self-hosted WP as a step up from Wix and the like: a way for clients to have a site which can be built exactly to their standards without needing to compromise functionality or design to fit in with how the framework works, and Gutenberg feels like a huge step backwards in that regard.

I fear a schism in WordPress: I have a feeling we’ll see the last non-Gutenberg version branched and repackaged as something else for those agencies and developers among us who use WP as a framework rather than just another me-too sitebuilder. Leave that for .com, especially now it supports plugins.

There are a lot of things which could and should be addressed in WordPress core to maintain .org’s position in the market. The REST API needs a lot of work, especially around security. The “menus” system hasn’t kept up with the use of WP as a CMS and building menus of any kind of complexity or depth is unwieldy and slow. Revisioning on custom meta is long overdue. Media management (with search and tagging) should be a simple core update – there are already good plugins. Gutenberg feels like a huge change for the sake of addressing a couple of little issues a few users have: more than this, it feels like a cynical attempt to win back a market share from Wix and SquareSpace when .com should be doing this, not .org

It’s also interesting to look at the Drupal model of doing this: the editor is a module which can be swapped in and out and when setting up the site you can pick which you use. Why not take this approach? Change the wp_editor action to call whichever editor is installed. Add a step to setup to pick Gutenberg, tinyMCE or another. On installation, let the user pick if they use Gutenberg (default) or tinyMCE. If you’re storing page/post content as a filterable string of HTML then WP should be editor agnostic. Add a filter to allow plugins to replace the editor (tinyMCE, Gutenberg) with whatever the developer wants, and give filterable options in terms of page layout (Gutenberg’s plain or the classic “with post meta” version). Failing this, why not allow a setting in wp-config to keep “classic” WP? It’s all there. Add to it, fine, but don’t take the option away from us.

I know it might feel a bit over-dramatic, but Gutenberg makes me feel very sad for the future of WordPress among agencies and for medium businesses and enterprises. I’m regretting selling WordPress for some recent projects which are going to need to be rebuilt ahead of their time if this becomes core. It’s making me wonder whether I should be investing my time in learning a new framework and selling that to my clients instead, and it’s certainly making me think hard about taking on new projects which need to have a lifespan of 3-5 years. I’m even considering moving to Drupal, which is a terrible terrible thing to say. That would be a huge shame: I’ve invested 10+ years in WordPress and the thought of Gutenberg becoming core feels like the beginning of the end for my kind of business.